Hal

I’m never quite sure how to handle writing about other people in these days of identity stealing. I’m following my general rule of no last names. Hal is a colleague of mine and a friend. He’s been the primary SF Symphony sound man since Davies Hall opened in 1980. I had worked on his crew for Symphony Pops at the Civic Auditorium in the late ’80s as well as some other jobs around town. When I came back to San Francisco ten years ago and got sent to a call at Davies, it was good to see him again.

In 2012, my involvement with the Symphony grew and I found myself working with Hal much more. Our birthdays are only about a week apart and our professional paths have some similarities. Neither of us had family or neighborhood contacts to help us get started in the business. We were driven by an intense interest in sound reinforcement and became successful by determination and hard work.

Our experiences coming of age in the ’60s was another commonality. The San Francisco music scene then was world class. We’ve had a lot of fun in the last few years talking about arcana from those days. He grew up in the City and I was on the Peninsula so he had more opportunity to see the various venues but I knew the names of who was in the bands, what instruments they played, and on what albums.

My first day back at work after Zach died was helping to put in the PA at Davies for Hal. (That was before we got the permanent one we have now.) When I asked to leave early he defended me to others who did not understand my grief as well. Over the next few months he showed me constant compassion and understanding for my grief.

After Sepi agreed to marry me, I started to think about the wedding and realized I needed a best man. Hal was an easy choice and he did not hesitate to say yes.

Last week I talked to him about some details of the wedding day and he told me he would take care of them because that was part of the deal. My nature is not to ask for help but, as he did before, he stepped up because he knew it was the right thing to do.

As of a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy was able to get his work to release him so he will be standing with me as well but Hal is still the best man. Sarah will be up there too. I am proud to be supported by such fine people.

Noah at Devil’s Slide

Zach would ‘pose’ for photos in scenic locations usually by assuming a mock amazed look often with his arms stretched out. The picture on the front page of this blog is a perfect example. In this one he doesn’t have his arms stretched out but it is one of my favorites from his last visit to California in 2014.

I wanted to take Noah’s family to Devil’s Slide not because I wanted to stage a similar photo but just because it’s an awesome place. Actually, although I had my camera, I wasn’t even thinking about it.

Then I saw Noah standing in the exact same place. OMG! I had to scramble to get my camera out. Noah doesn’t stay in any one place for very long. He wasn’t looking out to sea, but reading the sign there. About five seconds after I snapped this, he bolted to something else.

Dave

A little over a year ago, I posted this story about Dave. Noah’s Dad. This past week, Dave has been in California along with the rest of his family. A group of us met in Lake Tahoe over the weekend for a couple of days of camping and fellowship. They’ve been down in the Bay Area since Sunday and left this morning.

They culminated their visit last night by coming down to Mom and Dad’s house in Santa Clara. They were flying out of San Jose and stayed overnight there. An even dozen of us had a very nice dinner on the patio. The kids played with the toys Mom keeps there, they went over to the park and played in the sand, and they picked lemons off the tree in the backyard and made lemonade for everyone.

During all this activity, Dave was just being Dad: carrying Myles on his shoulders, playing airplanes with Myles, talking with Noah about this thing or that that we were seeing. Just like his comment from 2 1/2 years ago, Dave was always calm and engaged with his children.

I don’t want to imply that Ally was absent in childcare duties. She was not. She did plenty of carrying and playing too. She’s a stay at home Mom now and I think she appreciated having a little break. I’m sure having Zach’s family around her for most of a week had some special stresses. Whether Dave is like this all the time or if he recognized those stresses doesn’t really matter. He was a great Dad this week. I’m pretty sure he’s a great Dad back home too. Yay Dave!

Language can be weird sometimes. I think I am Noah’s grandfather despite having no legal status as such. He has two more back in Ohio. Ally is the mother of this grandson but is not, nor was she ever, my daughter-in-law. Dave is just Noah’s Dad. Whatever else we call ourselves, I am proud to call these people ‘family’.

EDIT: Ally posted this photo on Facebook and I filched it. Maybe not so special in and of itself, but to me emblematic of Dave.

And just to be fair, here’s one of Ally at our Lake Tahoe campsite:

the Fourth of July

I stayed in Pacifica last night. I had to work until 2 yesterday afternoon and got lazy after I got home. I had talked to Mom and Dad about coming down but finked out. Unlike prior years, Pacifica had been fairly quiet in the previous week.

Although it wasn’t fully dark until 9:30, the bombs and skyrockets started in earnest about 8 pm. The back of my apartment complex faces the backs of some houses which all have decks. In almost eight years of living here I’ve seen people on those decks maybe 4 or 5 times. Last night was one of them.

There were a dozen or so people including kids. I could see beer bottles and cigarettes. I was hoping their deck did not go all the way to the house because they were shooting off big fountains and skyrockets right there in the back yard. The airbursts were out of my sight from my kitchen window but I could hear them. The fountains splashed sparks on their roof and their neighbor’s roof. The neighbor’s house was dark so I assume they weren’t at home. Maybe they were on the deck.

Out the bedroom window looking towards the beach we could see several large displays. About 9 pm a police car sped down Linda Mar with its lights on but no siren. A minute or so later came another, then the fire truck from the station up the street. The fire truck put its siren on. There was smoke all over.

It’s the first time I’ve ever seen (or heard) police and fire presence on the Fourth of July in Pacifica.

I went to bed around ten. The explosions continued for at least another half hour. I believe I fell asleep about then so I don’t know how late it all went. If there were big explosions later they didn’t wake me up. I am thankful for that. I remember in years past huge bombs at one in the morning.

Also in years past there were big signs posted along Highway 1 in the run up to the Fourth saying that Pacifica had ‘zero tolerance’ for illegal fireworks. The fine was publicized as $1000. I didn’t see those signs this year, perhaps because there is work going on upgrading the highway. Maybe instead of ineffectual signs, the city has decided to actually prosecute the scofflaws.

My favorite guitar forum, TDPRI, had a discussion on fireworks with predictable comments from some about restrictions on ‘freedom’. Another common theme was how communities have banned fireworks but people get them and shoot them off anyway. Sepi says Brisbane enforces their fireworks ban more closely, perhaps because they are right up against San Bruno Mountain, which is covered in dry grass.

I suppose in the big picture of where our country is going, this is a small thing. OK, rant over. Tomorrow we are heading up to Lake Tahoe for a group camp out in honor of Zach. I think I’ll do another whole post on that happy subject.

moving

It’s official. Sepi and I will be moving into her house in Brisbane in September. Despite my efforts to not accumulate ‘stuff’ there is a lot of ‘stuff’ in this apartment that I do not need.

I have three boxes of Zach’s ‘stuff’ that I have already decided I can let go of. He had looked at it all in 2014 and said he didn’t want any of it. I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away then and I hadn’t even thought about it at all until very recently. I’ve reached out to his siblings and to Ally but there is no interest. It’s possible his mother may want them. That inquiry is pending.

I sent out a message this morning to relatives about my furniture that I will not be needing in a couple of months. Perhaps in the coming weeks I will host visits where they can look through my things for ‘stuff’ they want. Meanwhile I will be accumulating boxes to put things in.

From 2004 to 2010 I moved three times. It doesn’t sound like much but I had been in the Grass Valley house with a family for ten years. There was a lot of ‘stuff’! Also, there was a lot of shuffling of ‘stuff’ back and forth between two houses for a while culminating in the foreclosures. Some things I thought had value I just left in the house for the new owners. I had no room for them where I was going.

I learned that I didn’t need most of that ‘stuff’ in my little apartment. There is a hardware store down the street that sells screws and things by the piece. I don’t try to work on my own car any more. Pacifica has a library.

Sepi’s house is comparatively big but we are both committed to downsizing in the long run. Ultimately our expectations are that we will move to a condo with a pool and an exercise room with shops nearby. Then we will have to downsize still more.

the Symphony

I work at Davies Symphony Hall and ‘hear’ the San Francisco Symphony a lot. I put ‘hear’ in quotes because I usually ‘hear’ them from inside the lighting booth through one microphone hanging above the stage and some inexpensive speakers.

Today I went into the hall for some minor maintenance reason while the rehearsal was going on. OMG, what a sound!

I’ll tell you, live music on real instruments. There’s nothing like it!

BTW, MTT was conducting Mahler in what’s called the antiphonal setup. That is when the first and second violins are on opposite sides of the stage. No surround sound system can duplicate this!

two years

Sort of continuing my last post . . .

Originally, I was going to write about my last week and how stressful it has been making preparations for my wedding with Sepi. This is not a political blog.

I may develop that further but for now I want to acknowledge the second anniversary of my public writing here.

Two years and two weeks ago I put up my first post on this blog. This post is number 277. If I’ve done my arithmetic right, that’s a post nearly every three days on average. That’s remarkable especially since the last three months have been much less often than that.

Thank you to my loyal readers and commenters. You are few but very meaningful. I’m going to try to write another post tonight to bring my average up. (Just kidding.)

separating children

Lots of words have been written about the policy of our current President regarding refugees trying to enter the United States with children. I did not originally intend to add to them but I just ran across an extraordinary testimonial that touches on the issues of immigration and children.

Here it is: link (PDF)

It struck me that there are similarities between my family’s loss of Zach and these family’s loss of their children. There are important differences, of course. Most importantly is that these children are not dead, but the separation is like a death. As Dr Krell illustrates, the change is profound in their lives.

I think we are like these children, ripped from our loved one by forces we do not understand. I at least had a chance to say goodbye to Zach’s body. I don’t remember crying much that day while we were at the funeral home, but that night in the shower where I thought no one could hear me, I wailed.

at Mom and Dad’s

I came down here yesterday because Mom had an issue with vertigo and was going to the doctor. I had the day off and didn’t want her to drive if it could be avoided.

The doctor said basically that there was nothing to be done about the vertigo except rest. Mom had taken some expired medicine she had for sea sickness and thought it had helped but the doc said no, don’t do that.

Anyway, she’s better now. She has an appointment with her dentist this morning to put a permanent crown on so I decided to stay and drive her there as well. Her original plan was to drive up to Jane’s tonight for a Pampered Chef party which worried me. Last night, though, she decided she was not going to go so I feel better.

The weather was warm yesterday, in the 80s, and it reminded me of the air conditioning battle I had waged and lost six months ago. It’s a little after 7 now and I’ve been up for about an hour. It’s beautiful outside but it promises to be warm again today. Mom and Dad close their house up tight every night religiously so this morning the first thing I did was go around and open up some windows and doors. (I had the window wide open in my bedroom.) The temperature in the house has gone from 73 down to 71 in that time. All the fans that were running last night were shut off during the night.

When I lived in Grass Valley, we would set the fans in the wide open windows running full blast at night. The house would be almost too cool in the mornings but we would button everything up by 8 or so including keeping the drapes closed and the house would stay at a reasonable temperature most of the day. I know Mom and Dad want their house to be secure but comfort is a thing too. I am going to try to convince them that there are not burglars going through the neighborhood every night looking for open windows.

Mom did say last night that she will be proactive about going to the library or the movies (for air conditioning) if it gets really hot. I’ve been in my coastal cocoon lately so it was good to get a reminder that it’s summer time in Santa Clara. I’ll watch the weather more carefully.

Jane is finished with school as of tomorrow so she’ll be able to come down more easily for a while.

crisis

One week ago last night I wrote this word in my datebook. I use my datebook for more than just appointments and work records. I make notes of my activities when I feel like it. Sometimes I wonder when I saw a certain movie or had dinner somewhere and I can page back through the datebook and find out.

Last Wednesday’s box has ‘suit in for alterations’, ‘Jack Grad party’, and ‘– crisis –‘.

The crisis was Sepi telling me that she could not marry me because I was an atheist and to for her to marry an atheist was to turn her back on God. Her suggestion was that I ‘accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior’.

For those who don’t know, I was raised as a Catholic and was active in the Church throughout my high school years. I went to Mass regularly, sang in the church choir, and was active in the parish youth group. I had attended parochial school through the 6th grade.

In the late ’60s, there was a requirement for all American males to register for the draft, which was a mechanism for teh government to populate the armed services. One could argue that service in the military was an essential part of citizenship but that’s an argument for another day. The Vietnam war was a real thing and the draft and the military was in the thoughts of every young American male at the time.

With this background, I began to draw parallels with the military command structure and the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and not in a positive way. I felt that the reasons for the US to be waging a war in Vietnam were not good enough to commit such wastage of blood and treasure. And I felt that the requirements of the Mass were similarly arbitrary.

I avoided the military by the simple expedient of having a high draft number. A draft lottery had been introduced the year before I turned 18. My number was around 175 and the highest number that was going to be taken was around 50. My friend Bruce had a number of around 35 and was able to enlist and choose to go to Germany instead of Vietnam. Actually, I’m not sure of the mechanism but that’s what happened.

As for the Church, I just stopped going after I graduated. I went away to college and was obsessed with music so it didn’t seem important.

In our early conversations, I related some of this to Sepi and at one point used the word ‘atheist’ to describe my beliefs. We have had a lot of discussion about this in the last week and one of the questions was ‘When did you turn your back on God?’ My answer is, ‘I don’t know.’ That is to say, I can’t pinpoint an exact moment when I no longer felt there was a God. A more complete answer is that I did not turn my back on God. I did hold with the belief that there is ** something ** connecting everything in the Universe. All knowing, all seeing, etc. It has some similarities to what is commonly referred to as ‘God’ but I reject the idea that this ** something ** has human qualities. For instance, God, or this ** something **, does not ‘talk’ or ‘listen’ or have ‘will’. Those are human qualities. By assigning them to an omniscient being we diminish it (or Him, if you prefer).

Sepi wasn’t much impressed with my hair splitting so we talked late into the night without resolution. I had made an earlier commitment to meet with her pastor to discuss these issues but had been finding ways to not call him. That night we called him and he agreed to meet us the next morning.

Pastor Steve welcomed us to the conference room at his and Sepi’s little church. His first question to me was, ‘If you died today and had to stand before God, what would you say to Him?’

My answer was that I saw so many cognitive disconnects there I hardly knew where to begin. Our conversation was civil and respectful but Pastor Steve believes in the Bible as the literal Word of God, that Jesus is the Son of God and He died to forgive our sins and that we have to ask God’s forgiveness to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. My apologies to Sepi and Pastor Steve for paraphrasing. I hope I am fairly representing the gist of it. In any case, I could not agree with all of that.

We went around and around but there was no resolution. In the end, I agreed to do some reading of the Bible and Pastor Steve generously gave me one to keep.

After we left, Sepi and I continued our conversations. I said I would talk to other people who were Christian and try to find a way to reconcile my beliefs with hers. I did that, but it always came down to belief, the leap of faith, and it wasn’t there. Somehow, the core of my being was not able to buy into the concept of God as someone to ‘talk’ to.

We went through our weekend, doing things and continuing to talk, but all the wedding plans were on hold. The joy that I had felt thinking of my impending marriage to this woman was muted. how could I find a way around this difficulty. I had made it clear at the beginning that this was not something to take lightly and say the words just to get through the wedding. Sepi recognized at the beginning that there was a danger of resentment developing on my part if I felt I was compromising too much.

We were happy with each other in pretty much all of our day to day activities but this ultimatum, as I was beginning to think of it, was driving a wedge between us. It was on my mind constantly. Sepi at one point asked me how I was doing and I said I was unhappy because I was facing two bad choices: compromise what I thought was integral to my identity or lose her. This was all complicated by the fact that we had already chosen a date for the wedding and it was fast approaching. I was beginning to especially resent the deadline aspect of making this momentous decision.

Then early Wednesday morning she asked the question again and I responded in much the same way. Then she said, ‘I don’t want to lose you and I don’t want you to become someone you are not happy with. I will marry you as you are.’

I was stunned. Just like that? Well, not really. She hadn’t been just sitting back waiting for me to have a revelation. She saw my torment and was affected by it. She wanted me to be happy so she decided to break the log jam.

Now I felt bad. I want her to be happy too. We talked and talked. My love for her took a quantum leap as I understood what this was costing her. She has been born again since 1982. I promised to continue talking to Christian people trying to find her faith within me. I have a copy of the Bible on my tablet now and I have been reading it. But I can do all this without the tension of getting it done immediately.

I still see it as a tall hill to climb. I looked up the story of Saul and his conversion, though. He didn’t expect anything like that. One of our friends commented that finding God through revelation is all well and good, but most of us have to make the leap of faith without it. Too true.

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